


ignis fatuus

by WritingToKeepMySanity



Category: Darkwing Duck (Cartoon 1991), DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Multiverse, Sad sack Drake Mallard, Slow Burn, elements from both DDtD and LGD, universe-hopping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29890611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingToKeepMySanity/pseuds/WritingToKeepMySanity
Summary: Ignis Fatuus. Latin. A false hope.Gosalyn Waddlemeyer is a kidnapped orphan, trying to prove her grandfather's disappearance.Drake Mallard is a lonely actor who just got his big break.Launchpad McQuack is—was—Mr. McDuck's personal pilot, now just chauffeur.None of them are where they should be, and none of them can shake the feeling that there's something very, very wrong with that.
Relationships: Drake Mallard & Gosalyn Mallard, Drake Mallard & Gosalyn Mallard & Launchpad McQuack, Drake Mallard/Launchpad McQuack
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	ignis fatuus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night she’s supposed to break into McDuck Laboratories, Gosalyn is kidnapped by Taurus Bulba’s stooges.

Gosalyn narrows her eyes at the goat—Mr. Hannigan, Mrs. Cavanaugh had said—who looks completely out of place in his pinstripe suit against the fancy decorative plates they weren’t allowed to touch in Mrs. Cavanaugh’s kitchen.

“So,” she drawls slowly. “You knew Grandpa?”

“Oh yeah,” he says in a nasally voice that grates against her brain. “Me an’ your Gramps go way back. See? That’s, uh, me in the picture, there.” He holds his phone out, a picture of her, Grandpa, and Bulba on the screen. There’s no one else in the picture, just a smudge that looks like—

 _Actually, that looks like a grape jelly stain_.

—cream cheese. She shakes her head, feeling a sense of déjà vu wash over her, even though she’s pretty sure she’s never met Hannigan before.

He does look kinda familiar, though. She’s probably seen him around the lab, but this guy’s definitely security, not a scientist like Grandpa. He’s way too stupid-looking.

When she doesn’t say anything, he clears his throat, pocketing his phone and looking at Mrs. Cavanaugh. “Why don’t you an’ me take a walk around the block, swap stories about the old days?”

Gosalyn gives Mrs. Cavanaugh a slightly uneasy look, half-hoping she’ll say no, even if there’s part of her that wants to hear about Grandpa. There’s just something about Hannigan that makes her uneasy.

On the other hand, if this guy’s as dumb as he looks, he’s probably got his keycard to the lab on him, like the one Grandpa used to have, which would make her plan for tonight a lot easier.

One step closer to getting her grandpa back.

That makes her decision for her. “Can I?” she asks.

Mrs. Cavanaugh looks uncertain, so Gosalyn gives her a sunny smile, the one she uses when she wants to prove she’s not up to anything.

“Oh, alright. Just stay on our street, then, okay?”

Hannigan leads the way out the front door, and Gosalyn follows him, pausing in the foyer to get her hockey stick from her bag.

“I was, uh, sorry to hear about your grandpa,” he says stiffly, like he doesn’t know how to talk to her.

He sounds just like everyone else who tells her that. Stiff and grown-up and like Grandpa’s dead and never coming back. And she’s getting really sick of hearing it.

“Did you work with Grandpa?” Gosalyn asks, passing her stick from one hand to the other, pretending to hit an imaginary puck with it, allowing herself to bump into Hannigan every few steps.

Hannigan grunts, trying to take a step away from her. “Oh, yeah, yeah. Like I said, we go way back.”

Wallet, keys, _ew_ , who sticks a half-eaten doughnut in their pocket?

Wiping her hand on her pants, disgusted, Gosalyn purses her beak, thinking of a way to get to his other side. Although, she’s starting to get a bad feeling from this guy, the longer she’s with him.

Maybe she should cut her losses now, stick with her original plan. Her arrowheads are sharpened enough to cut through glass, they’ll get her into the labs.

Running ahead a few steps, she turns back, taking a practice swing. “Yeah, well,” she finds herself asking, still. “What was his last project, then?”

Hannigan ducks as she swings, clearly forgetting that all she has is the stick and not a puck, and stammers out, “Th-the Ramrod, everyone knows that."

Gosalyn freezes a moment. The only people who knew about the Ramrod were her, Grandpa, and Bulba. If this guy knows anything about it, he definitely works at the lab.

“Hm,” she grunts, feigning casual, rounding to his other side, and resumes bumping into him.

Bingo, keycard.

Mission complete, Gosalyn turns her attention to getting back to the house. She’d been so focused on trying to get the keycard out of his pocket and into her own that she didn’t realize they had turned the corner. “Uh, technically speaking, aren’t we on the street over?”

A red van pulls up to the curb, suddenly, brakes squealing. “Well,” Hannigan drawls, sneering as a ram hops out of the van. “I thought we’d go for a little ride. Taurus Bulba just wants to have a little chat with you.”

Gosalyn blanches. Bulba must’ve figured out her plan and sent Hannigan and his goons to keep her from proving his involvement with Grandpa’s disappearance.

The ram moves in on her and she ducks around them. “Nuh-uh! No way, no one’s kidnapping Gosalyn Waddlemeyer!”

She backs up to the street, as though she’s drawn there. Maybe someone will see a little kid being chased after by two men and stop to help her.

_Never fear, little miss!_

Gosalyn’s head whips around, chasing the voice and the low rumble of a motorcycle, but there’s nothing there, no one to save her, and Hannigan’s hands clamp around her biceps before she can think of another escape.

A sweet-smelling rag is pressed over her beak, and the last, unsettling, thought that passes through her mind is that none of this is going the way it was supposed to.

~*~

Gosalyn wakes up in a brightly-lit room. She’s being carried like a sack of potatoes over someone’s shoulder, and they’re walking down a long hallway of identical-looking cells. Her stomach lurches with the movement and she presses her beak together against the wave of nausea.

Her brain’s still foggy from whatever they used to knock her out, but if she focuses, she vaguely recognizes a room from McDuck Labs. She’d spent almost every night in the labs with Grandpa for the past two years, she’s explored every inch of the building Grandpa’s keycard could give her access to, which was a _lot_.

But this room was boring, just clear-walled cells and keypads, and Gosalyn hadn’t spent much time in the room.

“Hey, uh, Hammerhead,” a whiny voice that's even worse than Hannigan’s says. “I’ve been thinkin’, what’re we s’posed to be doin’ with the kid, anyways?”

“You idiot,” Hannigan—and somewhere in Gosalyn’s foggy mind, she thinks _Hammerhead_?—says somewhere off to her right. “Just get her in the cell and leave the thinking to me, alright, Hoof?”

Before she can piece together what they’re talking about, or think of a way to escape, Gosalyn’s dropped to her feet, her stomach dropping past her shoes and head spinning. She has enough time to register the number outside the cell— _7132_ —before she’s shoved into the back of the cell, unceremoniously. There’s not much to it, the walls are lined with newspapers so she can’t see out of it and there’s a thin mattress in the corner with a questionable looking blanket covering it.

A moment later, the door hisses open, and Gosalyn turns to see Taurus Bulba enter the cell.

“Bulba,” she growls.

“Gosalyn,” he says, warmly. “I apologize for the theatrics. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

She glares at him, folding her arms across her chest. She’d never liked Bulba, but being kidnapped by him certainly didn’t put her in a chatty mood.

“Come now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Bulba says, his words slowly frosting over, no longer acting like a host.

Rolling her eyes, Gosalyn scoffs a little. They wrote better stuff on Saturday morning cartoons, she’s not afraid of her grandpa’s former partner.

He lowers himself so he’s eye level with her. “Give me the code to the Ramrod, Gosalyn.”

“What code?” she asks. She knew everything about the Ramrod, probably more than Bulba, and Grandpa—

_He never told me any code!_

_Well Taurus Bulba doesn’t know that. His men will be looking for you._

—designed it so it activated with a key. Gosalyn scrunches her face, trying to shake the voice from her head. Whatever they knocked her out with must’ve been _really_ strong. She doesn’t know whose voice that was or why it sounded so familiar.

Bulba shakes his head, looking disappointed, making a “tsk”-ing noise. “Now, let’s not play games. I knew your grandpa, and I know if he told anyone the code to the Ramrod, he would’ve told you.”

“Well, then you really don’t know much,” Gosalyn sneers. “‘Cause then you’d know that the Ramrod uses a _key_ , not a code.”

Bulba harrumphs something like a laugh, turning like he’s about to leave her in the cell. He turns back suddenly, arm extended, and a sharp pain blooms across her cheek. Her head snaps to the side as she pinwheels backwards, beak falling open in shock.

She always knew Bulba didn’t really like her—tolerated her, maybe, because of Grandpa—but he’d never been angry, never did anything close to _hitting_ her.

Before Gosalyn can react, he roughly grabs her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Your grandfather was right,” he says, grudging admiration. “You have too much spirit for your own good, Gosalyn. Don’t worry. We’ll break it soon enough.”

He lets go of her, shoving her back and turning on a heel to march out the door, which closes behind him, hissing shut and locking with a series of clicks.

Gosalyn blinks back tears, rubbing her cheek where it still stings. A camera winks at her from the corner and she sniffs, determined not to let Bulba or his henchmen see her cry.

Her hand falls to her lap, where her legs are pulled up to her chest. There’s a lump in her hoodie pocket, and she furrows her brow. Sliding her hand into her pocket, she feels the first ghost of a smile on her beak since she was thrown in that van.

Hannigan’s keycard. The idiot doesn’t even realize he’s still missing it.

If Bulba wanted spirit, she’d show him spirit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. This is a half-plotted, half-baked idea that wouldn't shake, so I'm pushing it on all of you! ;) not to give away the story, but be prepared for some slow burn Drakepad, a little found family, and some dubious knowledge of the string theory. Could be fun, could be a train wreck. Care to join me to find out?
> 
> Next up, we see what Drake's up to! I'd love to know what you think!
> 
> xx


End file.
